First Bus App

First Bus is one of the UK’s biggest bus companies with over 1.6 daily customers. My goal as the lead designer was to overhaul their fragmented mobile experience into a unified, digital-first platform. We aimed to consolidate journey planning, ticketing, and real-time insights into a single, high-utility tool that reduces travel stress and drives commercial growth.

Through user research, I identified that "travel anxiety" was the primary barrier to bus usage. Commuters faced three distinct friction points:

• Wait Anxiety: Unpredictable bus arrivals and confusing static route maps.
• Transaction Friction: Slow boarding times due to a disjointed mTicket purchasing flow.
• Planning Fatigue: A lack of personalized, door-to-door navigation forced users to jump between multiple third-party apps.

As the Lead Product Designer, I owned the end-to-end user experience. I led the research phase to map passenger pain points, designed the high-fidelity interface for core features, and prototyped the interaction models for live tracking. I acted as the bridge between user needs and technical feasibility, working closely with engineers to ensure features were implemented intuitively.

• The product strategy was focused on giving users total control over their journey:
• Live Tracking & Enhanced Maps: Overhauled the route maps to show real-time bus movement. By providing live arrival times, it replaced "wait anxiety" with actionable data.
• Streamlined mTickets: Redesigned the ticket wallet and checkout flow, making m-tickets (paperless tickets) the most convenient option.
• Personalized Journey Planning: Designed a door-to-door planner that prioritizes "Favorite" routes and stops, reducing the time-to-info for daily commuters.

• Certainty > Speed: Our research showed that users don't mind a 5-minute delay as much as they mind not knowing about it. Visualizing the bus on a live map provided a sense of control that significantly boosted user trust.
• Utility Drives Retention: By focusing on "one-tap" access to favorite routes and stored tickets, we moved the app from a "sometimes" utility to a daily habit for 1.6 million monthly users.

• User Satisfaction: 4.6-star rating across 220,000+ reviews.
• Mass Adoption: 1.6 million active monthly users.
• £120m annual revenue processed through the optimized mTicket flows.